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Comment by Crazyontap | Hacker News Reader

I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP.

Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is the only reason I have to keep Windows alive (or atleast use wine)

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I'll echo this. Every time I use GIMP, I have to google and re-google what I want to do, skip through a Youtube video for the pertinent parts, discover that the youtube video is for an outdated version, google again, yaddy yadda yadda. Even for something as simple as putting red text over an image, or cropping down a picture, it just takes forever to figure out the magic incantations to get google to return something like what I am looking to do. Yes, I am sure that it is great for complicated image manipulation once I have been using it for a few months. I've even sat down to learn it before, spending a few evenings for a few months trying to grok it. But 95% of the time that I need image processing it's for incredibly simple stuff. Honestly, MSpaint is sufficient for ~90% of my needs and it takes 1/20th of the time just to load, let alone get anything done. GIMP makes great stuff faster than anything else. But I do not want to make great stuff, I just want to put an arrow pointing at a button on a screen capture.

Know what you mean, I rarely have to do image editing, if I can't do it in preview, I groan, because it usually means I have to go to GIMP and waste hours doing something that seems very simple. I think last time it was just adding a black border to an image, there seemed to be a border tool, but it insisted on making a picture frame effect and I could not understand why it just couldn't do a simple single colour border. And it seems slow, moving around the image, things like that, it should be far better.

Agree, I kinda hated the GIMP but then I learned it's logic and I started to like it. The problem is when you used Photoshop before. Some things that you can do there with one click take quite tedious procedure in GIMP. For instance drawing simple rectangle with fill facepalm.

There was recently a post on HN about a GIMP fork called glimpse which aims to improve UI/UX: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse or project page at https://glimpse-editor.org/

It's great to see that, but I doubt they can do much about the big UI issues, which come from the way GIMP's internals work. The fact that you still can't select more than one layer, not even to move them around, is a 100% deal-breaker for me and everyone I've shown GIMP to.

Fortunately, Krita has gotten extremely good, even for photo work. If anyone has a shot at clawing back some Adobe market share, it's then.

I think moving multiple layers works in GIMP :o) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TwEPaV1ilc

IMHO, Gimp was much easier to use before they revamped the GUI to imitate Photoshop. For those who didn’t try it, it looked like this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleaning_up_Fourie...

The menu layout and structure looks exactly the same, except it's floating, which you get in modern GIMP by default. Can you explain in more depth how it's tangibly different?

The icons are different which still throw me off. The colour select tool is weirdly now stacked behind the cropping tool or some other selection tool.

That's why you learn keyboard shortcuts.

You can move those about though

Shit, that's exactly what photoshop used to look like (photoshop 7)

It might've been for you. No discernible difference for me.

Um... I think they need a copy of Photoshop if they're going to try to "imitate" it. They imitated it as closely as chopping onions is similar to learning how to drive a car. I checked it out in January, while doing a month of open source alternatives to Adobe. That's a big no.

Adobe is pricey but that money is pumped very well into UI. After playing with some of the open source alternatives... yea, $55 a month is now cheap to me since I now know what crappy UI and ass backwards workflows really look like.

For raster drawing there's Krita, for vector drawing there's InkScape, for raster manipulation there's GIMP. GIMP is really not for drawing and is cumbersome for those purposes. Just like you really wouldn't use InkScape for photo manipulation.

This is always surprising to hear, because for me GIMP is substantially more intuitive and productive and easy than Photoshop ever was. Maybe things have changed lately, but every time I've tried to use Photoshop my eyes glossed over, whereas whenever I fire up GIMP I'm pretty quickly able to figure out how to do something. This is especially true with "single window mode" enabled (which pulls those weird sidebar windows into the main window).

I definitely get that if you're already used to Photoshop then GIMP's gonna be an adjustment (and vice versa), and my GIMPing is admittedly not very complicated (mostly just making memes), but it's just weird to hear of people who think that Photoshop's actually easier to use given that I've experienced the exact opposite by pretty much every metric.

> because for me GIMP is substantially more intuitive and productive and easy than Photoshop ever was.

It took me some time to adjust, but yeah I felt the same.

> I definitely get that if you're already used to Photoshop then GIMP's gonna be an adjustment (and vice versa)

In fact the argument of people finding GIMP unintuitive is that Photoshop is better.

I mainly complain about GIMP's updates breaking changes though.

Yes, it's called the "baby duck syndrome" [0], and it's stopping lots of professionals from even looking up when it comes to trying something different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...

It’s interesting you say that, because I find myself to be quite productive in GIMP.

I think the basic set of tools are pretty easy to use, and the one or two other windows you need open (like the tool-specific settings) are also pretty understandable. When I stumble upon something new I often find pretty good official docs on the topic.

I don't know man maybe you're right.. But just today I had to edit a small screenshot and draw an arrow from text to a button and after trying all sorts of things like downloading scm scripts from defunct sites to reading two9 tutorials I couldn't do it. Maybe I lack knowledge to understand it. I kinda wasted more than 20 minutes and still don't know how to make arrow. Would take me 10s to do it in PS (plus boot time of Windows).

Regardless I do appreciate the hard work the guys have put in. I feel like such an ingrate to make comments like this about free software. I guess it's time to find an online course and learn it properly and if I still don't get it then that's that.

Have you tried photopea.com? Not affiliated but I use it and switched off Photoshop to this and it works for most purposes.

Only problem with GIMP is their idiotic decision to split saving and exporting.

A bit unintuitive, yes, but it makes sense. In PS, if I save as PSD, do some work, save as PNG, do some more work and save again, it'll be saving into the PNG, not PSD, which will effectively make me lose my work.

Their "Export and overwrite" menu makes it very convenient to do quick edits where you only care about the raster, and the split avoids the above mentioned stupidity when working on bigger projects.

Wow. So glad to hear I am not the only one who struggles with GIMP.

I find myself spending hours to do the most simple of tasks. Anytime I have to search for a tutorial on GIMP, I cringe. I am waiting for that UI/UX fork to come out for Mac.

What other alternatives are there that work on Mac besides Inkscape and Krita???

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